The rise and slide of the mall mentality

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If we're going to live in such a consumerist world, it's worth trying to understand how it works. At one level big business is merely earning a quid by giving us what we want; at another we are being subtly manipulated to keep spending.

One great technological advance in the perfection of the consumer society was the invention of the American mall - which, with variation, has been exported around the developed world.

Call of the Mall, published in the US by Simon & Schuster, is Paco Underhill's attempt to reveal the deeper significance of something many - including most economists - would regard as of little interest.

Underhill is a self-styled "retail anthropologist" and student of "the science of shopping". Don't laugh - he makes his living helping retailers increase their sales and profits.

Malls are a product of the growth of suburbia in the decades of great affluence following World War II. Sprawling suburbs make it necessary to own a car, but the growing ownership of cars made it possible for suburbs to sprawl.

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And one great attraction of malls over city shopping is the promise of painless parking. It's impossible to imagine malls that aren't surrounded by huge provision for parking.

Most US malls are not well served by public transport and this seems to be a deliberate strategy to limit access by poor minorities. Suburban sub divisions segregate people on the basis of how much they can spend on real estate. Everybody knows that wealth and poverty exist, but many suburbanites get no closer to either end of the spectrum than their television sets.

"We humans seem to find comfort in economic homogeneity, and the mall does its best to preserve that condition," Underhill says.

Comfort is a big part of the attraction of malls. A mall is a store of stores. In contrast to city shopping, it allows you to avoid cold or rain or heat as you move between shops. It also allows you to avoid the city's beggars, bag-snatchers and teenagers with attitude.

In cities, shoppers share the pavement with many other people - office workers, people visiting offices, delivery people. In malls, everyone else is there for the same purpose you are: to shop.

People move faster on city streets; they walk at a more sedate pace in malls. For some, it's pretty much the only walking they do. People rarely come to malls with a list of things to buy, which they fly around ticking off.

They may have certain purchases in mind, but they're inclined to wander around seeing what's on offer and exposing themselves to the possibility of an impulse buy. They are "meanderthals".

And what do people do when they're not looking at the merchandise? They look at other people. "People would rather look at other people than just about anything else," Underhill says.

Because suburbs tend to be short on gathering places, it all happens at the mall. Malls are the town centre for towns where no true centre exists.

Whole families tend not to be on display in many public spaces these days, but you can see them walking the mall.

As the kids get older, there are things you can send them off to do - the movies, games arcades, the food court - while you get on with your shopping. When the kids become teenagers they'll want to come under their own steam, to socialise and hang out as well as shop.

The provision of these entertainments is intended to prolong people's stay at the mall, it having been demonstrated that the more time people spend, the more things they buy.

That's what the food court's about, of course: allowing you to shop, fuel up, then shop some more. "Nobody goes to the mall expecting anything more than a plastic tray full of edible nourishment and a clean table on which to enjoy it," Underhill says.

Despite their family billing, malls are much more for women than men. The biggest category of merchandise by far is women's apparel. After that comes cosmetics.

Men, once you get them in the door, are much more interested in the social aspect of malls than the shopping part, whereas women say the social aspect is important but shopping comes first.

Malls aren't good at handling men. Historically retailers thought of men mainly as the "wallet-bearer" but, these days, women tend to have their own wallets. So men in the mall are secondary figures. They come to wait for their womenfolk.

The big theory of stores once held that women liked spending time in them because it was their main way of interacting with grown-ups. They were at home all day with the kids, then at home all night, too.

The mid-century shift to the suburbs only increased female isolation - and delivered women into the hands of the mall.

While that was happening, however, so was another trend: women working outside the home. Their infusion into the world of work is what has made the past two decades of middle-class life so materially splendid, even extravagant.

But while women now have a lot more money to spend at the mall, they also have a lot less time for leisurely strolling and shopping.

It seems pretty clear that, at least in the US, malls have reached their zenith. The Americans are not building a lot more of them. Some old malls are being refurbished, others converted to alternative uses.

Why is their day passing? Partly, according to Underhill, because of all the money being spent on new technology: mobile phone bills, pay TV, personal computers and internet service providers, DVD rentals.